If you find this article informative and worthwhile, please support my work by donating if you can.

logo    Fixing Public Education


Fixing Texas' public educational system is in the news today. The legislature is engaged in all kinds of contortions trying to avoid conforming to a court order to equitably fund Texas public schools, and The Texas Education Agency is engaged in surreptitious schemes to avoid complying with the requirements of the No Child Left Behind act. But this problem is not confined to Texas. Nothing the nation is now doing will fix the problems with American public education, because these problems are the result of outdated educational values and thinking based on the wrong model. So instead of trying to identify and correct the ultimate causes of the problem, Americans are, instead, attacking teachers. It won't work.

America has never placed a high value on education.  Read Richard Hofstadters Anti-intellectualism in American Life for the full story. As a result, education has never been adequately funded. But the amount spent on schools has been commensurate with our attitudes toward them. So, in  truth, American public education has never been anyway near superlative, and it's not going to be anytime soon.

Yet we enjoy taking credit for advances made in America and funded by Americans that were really only possible because we bought knowledge developed elsewhere. The two principal examples are the development of the atomic bomb, which could not have been done without the knowledge of the foreign trained scientists who worked on the Manhattan project, and our landing of men on the moon, which could not have accomplished without the knowledge of the German scientists we captured at the end of the Second World War. Most Americans are too young to remember our solely American attempts to launch rockets into space, most of which merely blew up on their launch-pads. But we take credit for these accomplishments  anyhow. Mere bravado!

So, now were into accountability and testing as solutions to the problem. But how are teachers responsible for their pupils performance?

Oh, I have no doubt that there are some teachers who are less than competent. But it is unlikely that the percentage of teachers in that group is greater than the percentage of less than competent workers in the workplace, lawyers and judges in our courtrooms, business executives in their suites, newspaper editors, or even lawmakers and presidents. Get a list of the presidents of the United States and underline the superlative ones. What is there to praise about Martin Van Buren, James Knox Polk, Millard Fillmore, Rutherford Hayes, William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge? What great minds these were! So why is it that although we do not expect high levels of competency in other professions, we want to see it in our teachers?

There two verbs associated with educationto teach and to learn. Why? Because education is a dual enterprise. The teacher teaches, the pupil learns. Although teaching may, in some cases, be a necessary condition for learning, it is not a sufficient condition.

Consider this example:

A teacher teaching mathematics has 30 students. At the end of the term, using an independent tester, one student earns a legitimate A, four earn Bs, ten earn Cs, ten earn Ds, and five fail. Some would consider these results unsatisfactory and blame the teacher. But if the teacher were truly incompetent, how did any student learn anything? How do you explain the A and Bs? The teacher taught well enough to enable some students to learn. Is it possible for any teacher to teach well enough to enable all the students to learn? Well, not if what we know about how intelligence is distributed over a randomly selected population is true. People, after all, are not all equally intelligent.

But even intelligent pupils sometimes failsadly, but true. Why? Because students have to cooperate with teachers if learning is to occur. Students must study, and often they do not. No teacher can do anything about that. Parents can, others in society can, but teachers can't.

The idea of accountability is based on the wrong model. We're thinking in manufacturing terms.

A raw material is delivered to a factory. Workers, presuming adequate tools are used, turn the raw material into products. If the workers do their jobs properly, a satisfactory product emerges from the factory. If they don't and there is nothing wrong with their tools, the workers can be considered accountable.

But students are only raw material in a metaphorical sense. The raw material that comes into a factory doesn't have to exert any effort of its own to be made into a product. But a student does. So how can the teacher be accountable if some, but not all, students learn?

The question we need to address is, Why many students don't study?. But were not addressing it. Part of the answer, however, is that their parents are uneducated and don't value education. And that's a cultural, not a pedagogical issue.

Then there;s standardized testingall the rage in Texas, and I mean rage in its ordinary sense.

Think about testing. A common occurrence in our colleges and universities is cramming before an exam. It does get many students through examinations they would otherwise fail. But how many of these students could pass the same test a month later without the benefit of a cramming session? We don't have to answer this question, do we? We all know the answer.

So what does standardized testing prove? Little if anything.

There you have it. Were going to fix public education by making teachers accountable and requiring students to pass standardized tests! Sure we are! But not until we all live in Disneyland. (2/27/2005)